John Carmack becomes Oculus VR's new chief technical officer

Update: Bethesda and Id have clarified the situation in a statement to Kotaku : "John will spend time working out of Oculus as part of his role with them, but he will also continue to work at id."

Original: Oculus VR - creators of the magical Oculus Rift face goggles - have just announced that Id's John Carmack will serve as their new chief technical officer. It's a good fit for the programming genius, not least because the Rift isn't, as I like to assume, powered by pixie dust and wishes.

"I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on," writes Carmack , explaining his reasons for joining Oculus. "Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer's early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there."

"Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It's certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don't even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It's going to be awesome!"

Carmack already has a history of supporting the Rift. He announced the device to E3 in 2012, and, at QuakeCon 2012, became the first developer to integrate the Rift into a game.

If you weren't convinced before now: listen, seriously, VR is going to be a big thing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil has been PC gaming since the '90s, when RPGs had dice rolls and open world adventures were weird and French. Now he's the deputy editor of PC Gamer; commissioning features, filling magazine pages, and knowing where the apostrophe goes in '90s. He plays Scout in TF2, and isn't even ashamed.